“The man’s a devil,” growled Robin Poussepain, still giddy from his fall. “He shows himself, and you discover he is a hunchback; he walks, and he is bow-legged; he looks at you, and he has only one eye; you speak to him, and he is deaf. Why, what does this Polyphemus do with his tongue?”

“He can speak when he likes,” said the old woman. “He is deaf from the bell-ringing; he is not dumb.”

“That’s all that’s wanting to make him perfect,” remarked Jehan.

“And he has an eye too many.”

“Not at all,” said Jehan judicially; “a one-eyed man is more incomplete than a blind one, for he is conscious of what he lacks.”

Meanwhile all the beggars, all the lackeys, all the cutpurses, had tacked themselves on to the scholars, and gone in procession to the wardrobe of the Basoche to fetch the pasteboard tiara and the mock robe reserved for the Fool’s Pope, with which Quasimodo permitted himself to be invested without turning a hair, and with a sort of proud docility. They then seated him on a chair, twelve officers of the Fraternity of Fools lifted him on their shoulders, and a gleam of bitter and disdainful satisfaction lit up the morose face of the Cyclops as he saw the heads of all these fine, strong, straight-limbed men beneath his misshapen feet.

Then the whole bellowing, tattered crew set itself in motion to make the customary round of the interior galleries of the Palais, before marching through the streets and by-ways of the city.


  By PanEris using Melati.

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